Fashion changes, yet fashion typography endures. Ever since Alexey Brodovitch adorned the pages of Harper’s Bazaar with high-contrast ‘Modern’ typefaces more than eighty years ago, typefaces with billowy curves and fine hairlines have remained a signature of the fashion industry. More recently, as typography has begun to play a more central role in visual storytelling, these typefaces’ exquisite details and proud features have invited larger-than-life applications, allowing them to create the same kinds of enticing visual fantasies as enthralling fashion layouts and well-dressed windows.

Because readers can identify the style at a glance, high-contrast faces are widely used for fashion titles from the newsstand to the web. But Modern typefaces in the elegant and formal Didot style aren’t the only option for creating stylish, transporting typography. To offer designers a new voice to work with, we’ve taken our Chronicle Display family, a smart and newsy design in the ‘Scotch’ style, and extended it into this new collection of bright and graceful typefaces for creating grand, expressive, and picturesque typography. Meet Chronicle Hairline®.

In contrast to the steely detachment of a Modern, Chronicle Hairline is direct and welcoming: a tweed to the Modern’s silk, a Savile Row to its Place Vendôme. Its subtly shaded curves and neatly bracketed serifs give Chronicle Hairline the kind of warmth normally associated with Old Style typefaces. But the clear geometry of its beaks and terminals, its unfussy numbers, and its alert and practical italics, mark Chronicle Hairline as an indisputably contemporary design.

Perhaps most usefully for anyone who works with big type — whether on book covers, posters, banners, architectural lettering, or identity programs — Chronicle Hairline is designed in three different widths: an approachable Hairline, a cosmopolitan Hairline Condensed, and a dignified Hairline Compressed, each in both roman and italic. Together with the Chronicle Display headline faces, the Chronicle Deck series for subheads, and the Chronicle Text collection for text, the new Chronicle Hairline adds an extra helping of sophistication to one of our most versatile and hardest-working type families.

Even when “communications” meant an e-mail campaign delivered to 317 readers, Journey Group of Charlottesville, VA recognized that stamps have a story to tell — and not just to collectors. Stamps are built on typography, making the web a natural place to share their rich visual heritage, and making webfonts an important part of the experience.

Though postage stamps can pass unnoticed, their typography is wonderfully playful, and the new USPS Stamps website strikes this balance with aplomb. It delights readers with its typographic grace and wit, but relies on webfonts to perform in a diverse set of circumstances, accompanying an unforeseeable collection of images, and rendering seamlessly across all the browsers used by the site’s vast audience.

For the site’s typography, Journey Group chose our Verlag and Chronicle webfonts. Instead of merely styling the site’s headlines, they implemented webfonts for all of the site’s type, using Verlag for both headlines and annotations, and Chronicle ScreenSmart for text. Using a ScreenSmart font ensured that the site’s text would maintain its visual integrity at even the smallest sizes, so that all of the site’s readers are presented with crisp, legible type.

“I’ve always admired Verlag for its modernist swagger,” said Senior Designer Seth Nickerson. “My feeling was that it could carry a page when needed, but also be objective enough to live comfortably with disparate elements, without looking out of place. Chronicle ScreenSmart seemed the obvious choice to pair with it: it has a crispness that matches Verlag, and just seemed to invite long-form reading when we looked at it in the design, which is paramount.”

The site’s typographic sophistication goes far beyond its palette. CSS transforms and subtle animations play a gentle but effective role in bringing the type to life, and the site is filled with gracious nods to philately (including our favorite, the perforated edge in the main nav.)

We’re proud to feature Journey Group’s work for the USPS as our first profile of a website using Cloud.typography. When we return, we’ll introduce you to a site that uses meticulous type and illustrations to strike the right tone for an international company. In the meantime, if you’ve made something special that uses Cloud.typography, let us know: we’re on Twitter at @HoeflerCo. —NW